uwot wrote: ↑Mon Dec 04, 2017 7:19 pmWell, if I can paraphrase WC (Ha! Maybe there is a god.), his argument is that:
Everything that has a beginning, has a cause.
The universe had a beginning.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.
If something like the above is how you understand WC's take on the cosmological argument, it falls at the first hurdle. There is no logically necessary connection between 'beginning' and 'cause'. You can state it as a scientific hypothesis, and believe it all you will, but it is not a sound logical premise.
I think the first premise certainly is a sound premise, but I think what you're saying is that it's not a valid premise, and for something like this, there honestly may be no real difference. There are a
few different reasons why craig believes the first premise holds true.
The first one is, that it is a kind of first principle of metaphysics that something cannot come from nothing; out of nothing nothing comes. Aristotle put it that being only arises from being, it doesn't come from non-being. And I think that this is a metaphysical truth that we do intuit rationally when we think about it.
Now I think that the questioner doesn't understand, perhaps, what philosophers mean when they talk about intuition. It's not like women's intuition, some sort of mysterious feeling or something; rather this would be a way of knowing some sort of a truth that is so basic, it's so primitive, that it is grasped as evidently true without needing to provide some deeper proof of it. Examples would include, for example, the truths of logic: p implies q; p; therefore q. Now how do you know that that logical truth is in fact true? There's no way to prove it because any proof would have to appeal to logic. So the truths of logic are something that one simply knows by a rational intuition when you look at them; it's just clear that they are true. Or modal truths, for example, that I could not have been an alligator. When you think about that I think it's obvious that being a person is something that someone has essentially, so that I could not have been a non-person like an alligator or a chair; that would be a different being than me. How do I know that? Well, you can't prove that but it just seems evident when you think about it, that I could not have been an alligator, for example. Or other sorts of intuitive truths. This table could not have been made of ice. When you think about it that seems intuitively true; it's not that you can prove it but it just seems evident.
And I would say in the same way when you think about the metaphysical principle that something cannot come from nothing, that seems to me to just be evidently true. And I don't think that this is idiosyncratic to me; on the contrary this is one of the oldest principles of metaphysics, Kevin, that has been recognized since the time of ancient Greek philosophy right up through the present day, so that I stand well within the mainstream of philosophical thought in saying this
So when I say that there may well be no real difference between sound and valid in this case, is because craig believes it's true exactly because it seems intuitively true, likening the idea to how the law of thoughts are intuitively true. His other reasons for the premise are:
And what Prior and Edwards pointed out is this: if something can come into being without a cause then why doesn't just anything and everything come into being without a cause? Why doesn't root beer and bicycles and Beethoven pop into being uncaused out of nothing? There can't be anything about nothing that would constrain what pops into being because nothing isn't anything, it has no properties, no potentialities, no being whatsoever. So if something can truly just pop into existence uncaused out of nothing then it's inexplicable why just anything and everything doesn't pop into being out of nothing. Why is it only universes that can pop into existence uncaused out of nothing? What makes nothingness so discriminatory?
And then finally the third line of defense would be as an inductive inference, namely, as we look around the world, as we explore the natural world, we see that things don't just pop into existence uncaused from nothing. Things that begin to exist do have causes. So even the scientific naturalist ought to agree with this premise, and in fact, I think, most of them do.
It's something to note that WLC has an interpretation of quantum mechanics that the particles created by the quantum field comes from elsewhere.
unwot wrote:The second premise is selective opportunism. He is assuming that the the Big Bang occurred ex nihilo, and that therefore there was nothing 'physical' before the 'creation'. There are several theories about the conditions prior to the Big Bang; the fact is we simply don't know.
So there you go; one of each. The first premise is unsound because of rotten philosophy; the second because of even worse science.
It honestly doesn't matter to the argument if there was; He think it's impossible for something to be eternal in the traditional sense of having an infinite past, and that only a being could cause in timelessness. I explained why in my first post. If there was something before the big bang, the same thing is just posited for that.